


In Writing

by SpiralsRespite



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Fresh-outta-the-ice Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Feels, Sucky Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:28:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27676055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpiralsRespite/pseuds/SpiralsRespite
Summary: After SHIELD discover Steve in the ice, they restrain him to an underground facility where his adjustment to the new century can be moderated. Yeah, maybe not the best choice of environment for a lonely super soldier. So, they throw a counselor at him. Unfortunately, that doesn't go over so well.OR Fresh-outta-the-ice Steve is sad and confused, and I wanted to write about it.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	In Writing

One time, Steve had been shot in the leg. Once he had dropped to the ground with a choked howl, the nazis responsible for the hole in him that had started bleeding in earnest had flocked over and began kicking him into the dirt with fervor.

Yeah. That had been a rough one.

Of course, Bucky had managed to snipe them down, and Morita had patched him up. But, it had been less about the gunshot wound and soreness from where their boots had struck than it was about the way they’d mobbed together over him until all he could see was the pressing blackness of their uniforms and their feet swinging at his face and all he could hear was their laughter echoing off the tunnel walls.

Now that Steve had been hurled forward to 2012, he made an effort to keep his mind out of the past. Which was why he was surprised when the memory of that particularly harsh scuffle in those damp tunnels winding through the Alps of 1945 rose to the forefront of his mind as he sat down across from the “counselor” SHIELD had assigned to him, a middle-aged woman with a head of frizzy black hair dressed in a crisp pale blue pantsuit.

Why the hell had that god awful night in the tunnels come to mind now?

Probably because Steve would rather be anywhere else in time and space, even if it was curled into himself on the ground as he bled out and got the shit kicked out of him by nazis feverish for his shouts of pain, than here in this room with a stranger set on exposing Steve’s deepest, most personal turmoils.

He was probably being dramatic.

The woman cleared her throat and began, “My name’s Marline Call, and I’m here only to help you. What should I call you, Captain?”

“Whatever you like,” Steve responded without thinking, still caught up in dispelling the lingering memory of that long past hellish struggle against the horde of nazis. (God, if that wasn’t also a fitting way to describe some of his longer nights.)

“Can I call you Steve?”

“Go ahead,” Steve replied, tracing the lines of the room with his eyes.

There really wasn’t much at all in the room to distract himself from imminent doom with. It was a stark white room equipped with only two chairs and a table between. Yeah, SHIELD wasn’t so great when it came to making spaces seem hospitable or even just spaces that didn’t resemble an empty void. Almost every room Steve had passed through in the compound SHIELD was housing him in ever since they pulled him out of his ice-slumber had been the same blank white. Steve was uneasy enough as it was without the constant assault of blank white walls on his eyes. But, then again, everything seemed to put him on edge these days. It was pathetic, really.

“And how are you feeling today, Steve?”

“Just fine,” he told her, glaring at a miniscule smudge his eyes had narrowed in on the opposite wall and his voice coming out a little gruff.

Marline gave a polite laugh. “You don’t _sound_ just fine.”

“Guess not,” he allowed.

“Can you tell me why you might be feeling less than fine?”

“No,” Steve said before he could stop himself.

Marline raised her eyebrows.

“I’m sorry, I meant I- ” Steve quickly tried to amend his bluntness, but when he couldn’t find the words, he fell silent, frustrated with himself.

“Can’t find the words?” she suggested.

“Yes.”

She gave him a warm smile. “Don’t stress it. Let’s start slower then.”

They worked through question after question about surface level things like daily routines and such until Marline started prying him for opinions and emotions again. When Steve proved to be just as tight-lipped as before, she leaned over and searched through her bag.

“Here, I have a pen and paper with me.” She placed them on the table. “Sometimes, we might feel uncomfortable admitting things out loud. So, you can just write down whatever it is instead. It can be hard to articulate feelings, so you can try to draw a visual expression of them. I know you were an artist.” She smiled sunnily up at him.

Steve was hit hard in the gut by remembering that he used to like to draw. It used to be such a huge part of his life, his identity, and yet it hadn’t even crossed his mind once since he woke up in this century. Not once had his hand itched for a pencil the way it used to always do whenever he felt agitated. And despite what Marline claimed about feelings being hard to pin down, it could without a doubt be said that he had been feeling more than agitated lately.

He looked down at his hands. He hadn’t felt anything in them besides the cold touch of the metal observation tables and the hard thump of punching bags. Were they even his hands anymore if they weren’t twitching for a pencil? Would he even be able to draw with the same skill as he used to or had his time in the ice stolen that away too?

He was almost choking with how foreign his own body felt, something he thought he would never have to go through more than just the once. He felt dizzy, his stomach was giving threatening lurches, and he most definitely was not in the mood to lay his heart out to Marline Call.

He stood up even though it made the nausea swoop and the walls seem to press in much closer. Had the room always been so small and the air so tight? But no, why was the door so far away? He waited until he was sure his walk wouldn’t waver in the slightest (it would only alarm Marline and invite a whole host of questions) before he strode to the door.

With his hand on the knob, he started to curtly say, “I’m sorry, Marline, but I- ”

He abruptly remembered that he had no personal responsibilities in the world today or tomorrow or the day after that. And she had been given his complete case file, meaning she undoubtedly had the times of every one of his scheduled doctors’ inspections memorized.

There were no excuses to make. No excuses besides admitting to something like feeling tired or hungry or sick. She’d surely raise hell over that. He’d given her nothing to report back to SHIELD about, so she’d cling onto and exaggerate his one confession of weakness to give her boss some proof that she’d done her job. And the only thing that could come from that would be SHIELD enforcing longer hours in bed, more nutrient solutions shoved in front of his mouth, or a grueling session with the medics.

So, Steve instead shut his mouth, jerked the door open, and left without another word.

Heart hammering in his ears and the overhead lights pulsing, he rushed through the halls back to his quarters. His mind wanted to calculate the new chances of Marline bringing the wrath of SHIELD health workers down on him, but he shoved all that away to keep himself from vomiting in the elevator.

God, what was wrong with him? Nothing that could be construed as especially frightening had happened, yet here he was leaning his throbbing forehead against the cool wall of the elevator and gulping down air. Ashamed, Steve scowled at the floor and huffed. He was just being dramatic.

The room kept spinning anyway, and as soon as the doors opened onto his rooms, he still had to make a beeline for the bathroom before he risked emptying his stomach in the entryway.

~~~

“Steve,” Marline tried.

Steve didn’t answer.

“Steve,” Marline sighed, “I know we all have bad days, but you’ve hardly spoken in any of our last few meetings. I want to remind you I won’t do anything to harm you. I’m not asking for any confessions, only insight into your mental state of mind. It doesn’t have to be specific, just if it is, I can do more to help. That’s what I’m here for, to help you.”

Steve had fallen into the habit of shutting his mind down as much as possible during these. As soon as he walked through the door, his mind defaulted to radio silence. He couldn’t risk another incident like their first talk. They’d hardly gotten anywhere that time and still his thoughts had run wild and sent him packing after two minutes in the room with her questions snaking into the deep corners of his mind he preferred to keep closed off and dragging out panic. He didn’t like how her questions beckoned introspection. He spent far enough time with his thoughts already.

It was especially awful when she swore to him she was here to help. He hated hearing that most of all. And he was ashamed of himself for hating hearing it on top of that.

So, the solution he’d firmly settled himself into was keeping his mind as empty as possible without coming across as horribly rude when he ended up ignoring most of what she said.

“Steve,” she entreated.

Steve relented. He really didn’t mean to torture Marline, and he could and should at least say so.

“I don’t mean to be difficult,” he began, “But…”

She was practically starving for an honest statement out of him, so he allowed himself to finish, “...but this is very difficult.”

She appeared to appreciate his pitiful efforts greatly, judging by the way she managed to sit up even straighter and how her eyes lit up.

When Steve didn’t elaborate, she turned to rummage through her bag.

“I know I’ve brought this out every time,” she told him, “but would you like to try it again today?”

Marline slid the pen and paper onto the table.

Steve chewed at his lip. He really couldn’t take the plaguing guilt over what he was putting poor Marline through anymore, so he pulled the pen and paper across the table and adjusted it in front of him, stalling just a little. Marline looked like she was doing her best not to burst with anticipation while trying to look as simultaneously encouraging and disinterested as possible.

He picked up the pen, fingers curling around it with the familiarity of hugging an old friend. It was always a relief that his hand remembered how to hold a pen, but he wasn’t about to test it any further and draw anything like Marline had urged him to. He’d take it easy and try to think of something to write, which was much less intimidating since he’d already gone through the apprehension and following enormous comfort of finding that he’d retained his hand-writing when he’d been given some papers to sign off on.

He scoured his brain for something suitably tame to put down in writing for Marline to obsess over. He wasn’t even sure he should risk writing “sad” given the week’s worth of amped up close watch after he’d stormed out the first time. They’d even had a guard stationed right outside his door while he slept to listen for “unusual sleeping patterns” (Steve overheard a lot of the orders passed between SHIELD personnel whether he liked it or not) instead of the usual few guards spaced out along his hall. That had been an especially tortuous week since he’d had to make sure to quickly clamp his hand over his mouth after he woke up feeling like he’d die if he didn’t let loose a scream. Or, he’d just sit awake all night to avoid the risk entirely. Still, sitting in the dark for hours at a time with his ability to rein his thoughts in slipping as the night drew on meant that the phantoms of his nightmares would crawl out of the chasms he’d forced them into and haunt his room with startling lucidity.

Suddenly, across from him, Marline bit back a gasp, hurried to arrange her face into one of sympathy, and reached across the table as if to take Steve’s hands in her own before thinking better of it.

“Now, I won’t press for details. But maybe you could tell me what it is they involve or if there’s a reoccurring one?” she asked. “Just say or write down whatever you’re comfortable with sharing today.”

Steve frowned in confusion. Then he noticed her eyes on the paper. He immediately dropped his eyes to the paper, too.

There, the word “nightmares” was written in his own hand-writing. His heart dropped to the floor.

His hand must’ve moved without his conscious command. It used to happen all the time. He’d be sitting with his pencil poised over an empty sketchbook page, get lost in thought, then look down to be greeted by a spread of rough replicas of the scene before him, whether it be a crowded storefront, fir trees bending in the wind, or Bucky laughing at some crude comparison Dugan made. Back then, pleasant surprise would bubble up in his chest. But now, Steve sat there petrified by the words on the page as if they were his death sentence.

“Steve?” Marline prompted in an emphasized sort of way that made Steve guess she’d been calling his name more than a few times now.

Anxious not to worry her by dropping into silence for too long, he blurted the first sentence that came to mind, “I-I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for! I’m quite.. well, quite pleased that you felt comfortable enough to share this with me!”

He was very, very, very not comfortable with this. Steve bit his tongue to keep himself from correcting her and slowly nodded instead.

“We’re making progress, you and me!” She beamed at him. “So! Hm, we can start off easy. You’re having problems with sleeping?”

She had literally inched onto the edge of her seat. With or without his paranoia, it was clear that she was dying to delve into a long, arduous discussion about what was troubling Captain America.

Half of his mind was racing through every possible plan of escape imaginable (The table would be easy enough to flip, wouldn’t it? That would be a good distraction, right? No, he might hurt her. Something else.) while the other half was doing nothing but shriek, “ABORT. ABORT. ABORT. HOLY FUCK, GET YOURSELF OUT OF HERE.” He’d broken into a goddamn sweat, and he was trying to wrangle some part of his brain to focus on breathing steadily. He would sooner die than voice his nightmares to Marline and have her relay it back to SHIELD.

That probably didn’t say good things about him, but he couldn’t bother to care. He couldn’t even bother to ask himself why he so desperately needed to take back that ugly word scrawled on the glaringly white paper. Before he could even assemble or cross-reference any of his thoughts, his mouth opened and four words spilled out.

“I’m really, very tired.”

She blinked a few times, somehow startled. “What?”

Okay, so now he had to work with this. It was also an admission, yes, but one much easier to handle. He’d take it.

“You’re- you’re exactly right. I’m not sleeping well. Last night was particularly awful, so I really just want to lay down. As soon as possible. Would you let me do that?”

It was a mal-formed excuse, but one that Marline wouldn’t deny.

“Oh, well I’m sure- Yes, yes of course. Rest is what’s essential, after all,” she managed.

With that, Steve slowly rose (he was supposed to be acting as if he was terribly tired) and took his leave. Once he was a fair bit down the hall, though, he took off, but not for his quarters this time.

Without batting an eye at any of the outbursts from the guards lining the hall (in the end, none of them dared lay a hand on Captain America), he marched into the office of the head of the operation surrounding his containment and adjustment to the new century, Officer Johnson. Johnson was sat at his desk, brow knit, and fingering through some manila folder’s contents. At Steve’s entrance, he only raised a single eyebrow. He’d watched his approach on the camera-feed then.

“Well, what is it, then?” Johnson demanded.

“Fury. I want to speak with him. Get me Fury,” Steve told him in a strained voice.

~~~

It wasn’t until two days later that Director Fury strode into Steve’s living quarters and demanded simply, “What?”

Steve stood up from where he’d been flipping through one of the many history volumes they’d piled into his room. He hesitated briefly, considering how to approach this. But, the familiar sensation of anger flaring up overtook him, and he ended up gritting out to Fury, of all things, “Her name’s not even Marline, it’s Maxie. I thought you promised we were done with the show.”

“I did. So, I’ll have you know the name change was entirely her idea. She insisted it would aid in making her seem less foreign to you,” Fury responded, unshaken by Steve’s glare and clenched jaw.

Steve’s eyes were stinging. The threat of tears. What the hell? All of a sudden something bordering on rage had swooped up from inside him and was now thundeirng through his veins. But, Fury was exactly the man he wanted to see, so why was he so angry? Why did he want to grip Fury’s shoulders and scream for him to let him out, please let him out of this living hell. He couldn’t take all the prodding by doctors and counselors, all the eyes of guards following him down the halls, the white walls closing him off. The last time he had breathed fresh air had been over sixty years ago.

SHIELD swore up and down that they needed to monitor his health after being frozen for so long, that the new world would be too much for him without an isolated adjustment period, that people would be sent to hunt down and capture an asset like him the moment of his release. And Steve hadn’t argued even though arguing was practically all he’d done all his life. Fuck, he hardly recognized himself.

What the hell had happened to him?

The first week after waking up, his mood had been sporadic to put it lightly. One minute he was petrified by the sheer horror of it all, the next he was crazed with anger and on the verge of throttling the guards outside as if it was them who took his whole world from him. But before he could even move to the door, he’d be consumed by a misery that strangled him to the floor. And then the cycle would repeat. It had been utterly exhausting.

So, Steve had settled into relentlessly stifling all emotion to escape the toll riding the emotions out took on him. But, as he felt all of it seething up inside him with a new strength, he was now realizing that had really just made it worse.

He stared at the man across from him, and Fury stared back.

As it became apparent that Steve was lost in his own head, Fury prompted him, “I’m guessing there’s more to why you called me down here. And please, make it a good reason, I’ve got some senators who won’t be forgiving me anytime soon for skipping out on their meeting.”

Steve forced his thoughts back to the conversation at hand and told Fury as firmly as he could manage, “I’m done with constant surveillance. I don’t know why it's taken me so long, but I can’t live like this anymore. You can’t keep me here. I- I can punch my way out if it comes to that.”

Fury heaved a sigh like he’d been expecting just that.

“Rogers, you have to understand- ”

“No, I’m done with SHIELD’s shit excuses,” Steve fiercely cut him off. He hadn’t let himself get angry in weeks, and it was shooting through him with a vengeance. It was kind of funny how almost comforting it felt to just let himself be mad again. “You _will_ let me out, Fury. I don’t care if the world up there confuses me or if I have to fight off a hundred governments trying to acquire me or if I drop dead the second my body makes contact with the new make-up of the atmosphere or whatever the fuck. You can’t hold me when I’ve broken none of your laws.”

“That’s not- ”

“What right do you have to lock me away anyway?” Steve snapped. “Why the hell should I stand for this goddamn detainment a second longer? It’s not like I’m mentally disturbed or- or dangerous, am I? Why don’t I just- ”

“ROGERS,” Fury barked.

Steve shut his mouth but didn’t stop glaring.

“Rogers,” Fury started again more calmly, “I’m in agreement with you.”

Steve did stop glaring then. He had been gearing up for a long-winded fight.

“Th- thanks,” Steve said dumbly.

“You’re welcome,” Fury responded with an expression no warmer than it always was, “I’ve been arguing on your behalf for over a week now for your release. It was decided we’d break the news two days from now, but then you asked for me, so here I am, letting you know now. It’s up to you where you go from here, Captain.”

Abruptly thrown back into agency over his life, Steve blinked back at him.

Where in the world would he go anyway? They couldn’t send him home, he didn’t have one anymore. Everyone he knew was dead. He was alone and well aware of it.

The weight of that fact bore down on him harder than it ever had in his life, and Steve fell into the single chair SHIELD had provided his room with and rubbed his hand over his head.

“Of course, I can give you more time to come to a decision,” Fury added, and Steve looked up at him. As controlled as it was, there was something like sympathy in the director’s face.

“No, no,” Steve said quietly, the thought of even just one more day spent in this compound tightening his throat.

There was silence for a minute. Fury stood patiently waiting while Steve sat thinking with his head in his hands. He couldn’t bring himself to care if he looked openly distressed. Right now, his mind was occupied with coming up with where he could go. It was also spinning with relief, which made focusing difficult.

Some small part of him noted that he should probably feel excited now that he was free to see this new world. There were a lot of emotions tugging at his heart, but excitement really wasn’t one of them.

Finally, Steve lifted his head and began, “I was frozen for over sixty years, and I’m done with it. I… I need to move.” He fixed his eyes on Fury’s one. “Just… just give me something to do.”

Fury nodded, smiled a little sadly, and told him, “I have some ideas.”


End file.
